Is Slam Poetry the Future of the Genre?

[IceM]

Just a curious question, not a scholarly one.

Now I know of course in some universities halls scattered throughout the world (and on this website) there are amateur and professional poets staying true to classical poetry. But in a lecture my AP English 12 teacher delivered on poetry recently, he made the following statement:

"The average reader lacks the technical ability to comprehend classical poetry. And frankly, the average writer lacks the technical ability to craft it. Too many poets are finding themselves restrained by the classical art and are turning to other areas of writing where they can be more direct. Like Slam poetry."

I'm an amateur poet experiments with form (not to be an experimentalist, just to find a suitable structure) who writes Slam poetry often. And while I disagree that people are turning to Slam because they lack the technical prowess, I do notice Slam poetry is growing.

I know canonically the two forms of poetry are largely separated, for classical poetry takes a greater sense of structure while Slam seeks to make you "feel" something through far-fetched figurative language (not that both forms can't achieve what the other does). But do you think Slam Poetry is the future of poetry? Also too, how do you view this genre of poetry and how valuable will it be as an art form in the future?

[mortalterror]

No. It's terrible.

[OrphanPip]

I'm with Mortal on this, if slam poetry is the future of poetry, poetry is doomed. Slam poetry isn't always all bad, but it's not something new either. Performance poetry was somewhat common in the 19th century as well, and frankly we don't really remember those performance poets at all.

[Paulclem]

I wonder if poetry will merge with some of the digital arts? Movies and images and sounds could provide interesting backdrops to arrangements of words. I suppose that's getting a bit towards song, but not necessarily. I think it needs a jump start for a newer generation.

[IceM]

I'd contest that Slam poetry is terrible. While I do try (and occasionally succeed) with both Slam and classical verse, I much prefer the former, not just because it affords me greater spontaneity with my writing and structure, but also because the former feels more tangible. I get a greater sense of satisfaction in hearing the creative capacities of poets seeking to reinvent certain imagery than in reading Sandburg, Hughes, and some others although I respect and admire them highly.

Perhaps that's just me. I have talent in both capacities of writing, so I'm afforded the luxury of having options on what to write. But, aside from the performance qualities of Slam competitions, I do feel spoken word poetry is more imaginative, and in that regard, more entertaining. Furthermore, couldn't it also be said that Slam is more pertinent to our time, not in cultural value but in message? Much of the canonical work has a timelessness that transcends the constructs of the society it was formed under; Slam has a direct relation to the messages of the time, as many have contemporary musings? Or does that quality hamper it's qualification as a strong art form?

I'm just curious. If I ever plan to pursue poetry as a hobby I'd like to know where the market will be.

[JBI]

On your teacher - the average AMERICAN/CANADIAN reader... the average reader HERE... And, the reason is simple - look at your teacher's attitude, no wonder they are so impoverished.

There really isn't a such thing as the classical, in the sense that there isn't a break between past and present. There is only one tradition, even in languages that didn't intersect, it is still the same tradition.

That being said, the reason why they do not understand it, is because they are never taught either to appreciate it, or forced to memorize it, and they are usually fed stories of how mediocre their teachers are, and how they are not respectable people (in some cases true). Elsewhere, it is forced upon them, they understand it, and don't think of it, elsewhere it isn't, but it perhaps means something (usually developing countries with nationalist sentiment).

Slam poetry represents a new idea, that, from what I can gather, is crappy anyway. It's a gimmick like sound poetry (the weird sounds people used to make as "poems") which will die eventually.

[stlukesguild]

The average reader lacks the technical ability to comprehend classical poetry.

And?? The "average" reader has never had the ability to comprehend the more complex forms and concepts in writing. It wasn't the masses reading Dante, Donne, or Baudelaire. As JBI suggests, this isn't a dichotomy between "classical" and "contemporary" poetry. The poetic language of the best poets of today is just as demanding (of the reader and writer).

And frankly, the average writer lacks the technical ability to craft it.

That, as JBI suggests, is because they were never properly taught. All art involves a language and a vocabulary which must be learned. If a writer lacks the ability to craft a well written poem then the logical step is to study and practice. If I lack the ability to draw as a painter, then the logical thing for me to do is to practice and develop this ability. What your teacher seems to suggest is that if an essential ability of the poet/writer is missing, he or she should seek out some alternative dumbed-down means of poetic expression... rather than putting forth the effort and the self-discipline.

Too many poets are finding themselves restrained by the classical art...

How are they restrained by something they can't even manage? They aren't restrained by classical poetry... they are shamed by it... and their own inabilities... and rather than put forth the effort, they turn toward the easy way out.

...and are turning to other areas of writing where they can be more direct. Like Slam poetry."

Unfortunately, it is not incompetence that tends to spur on innovation in the arts, but mastery. The greatest innovators tend to be those who have the greatest respect for the tradition and the willingness and self-discipline needed to master their artistic language.

[JBI]

Meh, it's about the agon - the early Bloom theory with the Freudian element removed. If you cannot compete, it is easier to play a different game through gimmick, since competing is challenging (not everybody can win the top prize, after all).

Slam just tries to break the field with a gimmick. Maybe one or two great poets will do something of worth within its scope, but it won't "replace" or "do much in general to the poetic tradition it rejects, and yet, is completely absorbed of.

It reminds me of something I read of this Anglo-Saxon verse type that would be to take the simplest phrase and say it in the most complicated way possible in a show off manner (orally, since it was memorized, not written). Those aren't read now, and the Slam fits within a long tradition of those types of gimmicks.

[SFG75]

By no means would I have a finger on the pulse of poetry. All I know is that the students that I work with really enjoy it. They look forward to not only the poetry of Whitman or Dickinson, but also Anne Bradstreet and Keats. I have never been to a slam poetry event, though I would be open to the experience. Here is one interesting perspective on the issue.

Give poetry back to the people. (http://kevcad.blogspot.com/2008/03/give-poetry-back-to-people.html)


More people write poetry than go to football matches, and poetry is popular in schools, at festivals and at the hundreds of readings staged every week in pubs, theatres, arts centres and even people's homes. Poetry has reached a wider audience through films, radio, television and the internet, as well as through initiatives such as London's Poems on the Underground, which has been imitated around the world. More people than ever believe, as Jackie Kay wrote in her National Poetry Day blog, that "poetry makes us think about who we are".

[Paulclem]

There was quite a detailed study of what ordinary people write in Lancaster - a small North Western town in the UK a number of years ago. They were doing research into the types of literacies that ordinary people engage in everyday, and I recall them encouraging people to keep a writing journal recording what they had to write each day - from shopping lists to letters.

Local Literacies Reading and Writing in One Community: David barton and Mary Hamilton

What they found was that there were a significant number of people wrote their own poetry for their own enjoyment quite unbeknown to anyone.

It perhaps points to an undercurrent of interest in poetry that has not been exploited. Perhaps the suggestion in the article is correct, that the academic elite is stifling poetry. It is hard to finally conclude though. It didn't ealuate the poetry itself, but just gives an indication that there may be interest that is not being met.

[JBI]

There was quite a detailed study of what ordinary people write in Lancaster - a small North Western town in the UK a number of years ago. They were doing research into the types of literacies that ordinary people engage in everyday, and I recall them encouraging people to keep a writing journal recording what they had to write each day - from shopping lists to letters.

Local Literacies Reading and Writing in One Community: David barton and Mary Hamilton

What they found was that there were a significant number of people wrote their own poetry for their own enjoyment quite unbeknown to anyone.

It perhaps points to an undercurrent of interest in poetry that has not been exploited. Perhaps the suggestion in the article is correct, that the academic elite is stifling poetry. It is hard to finally conclude though. It didn't ealuate the poetry itself, but just gives an indication that there may be interest that is not being met.


There was a campaign of "Revolutionary Proletariat" poetry under the maoist regime to rethink Chinese poetics, led by an actually good poet, Guo Moruo. The result was essentially hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of mediocre unreadable verses that were "revolutionary," and unreadable.

What common people write in their journal is not important particularly to the scheme of good poetics, and the populist encouragement doesn't particularly create great art either, or cause it to be unearthed.

[Paulclem]

There was a campaign of "Revolutionary Proletariat" poetry under the maoist regime to rethink Chinese poetics, led by an actually good poet, Guo Moruo. The result was essentially hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of mediocre unreadable verses that were "revolutionary," and unreadable.

What common people write in their journal is not important particularly to the scheme of good poetics, and the populist encouragement doesn't particularly create great art either, or cause it to be unearthed.

I agree, but poets have to come from somewhere, and an initial, if untutored effort may lead to study and a better poet. To take a football analogy, if there weren't pretty mediocre amateur teams about to encourage and foster new talent, then we would never find the stars. Then again we don't need to use a different analogy. From the mass of published books turns up a new author who is really good.

I was also writing in response to the article posted above. Perhaps a lot more people write poetry than we think. However bad it is, it does point to an underlying, and perhaps unrecognised, interest in poetry that is certainly not addressed by publishers - perhaps because of their conception of good poetry, as it states in the article, or perhaps they are not aware. It was certainly a surprise in the study I cited that many wrote poetry for themselves.

[shortstoryfan]

Somewhere I read a quote, by...maybe Auden about student's of poetry. He said that if a student wrote because they wanted to say something, they would probably not end up being a poet. If they wrote because they loved to play with language, then they were more likely to be successful.

Most Slam poets have something to say. The poems are built around this one line at the end that ties everything together. There are written word poems that are like this as well, but I personally don't find them very interesting.

And a lot more people do write poetry than many people would think. There are more writing programs and independent presses today than ever before. Since I've started writing and being involved in writing groups it seems everyone writes. But just like the Maoist experiment, there are very few who succeed because for most people it's all based on what they are saying and not the music of the lines, syntax play, etc.

[blank|verse]

Slam poetry is not the 'future' of poetry, but it does have a future in poetry, and is a fresh, vibrant, youth-oriented branch of the genre. Most importantly, it stresses the performative aspect of poetry. Who cares if traditionalist snobs don't like it?

For me, the future of poetry is to get off the page and get back to being an aural art at least as much as it is currently a visual one. This can easily be achieved though poets reading their latest books and making these available as downloads (perhaps with a discount if you've bought the book). The only barrier to this is cost as far as I can see, and the lack of demand for poetry generally.

There have been steps in this direction for about the past decade in the UK, thanks largely to ex-Laureate Andrew Motion's Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do). I've found that once you can hear a poet's voice - particularly contemporary poets writing free verse - you can read their work a lot better. I think this is the way forward, because it democratizes the art - the 'average reader / listener' can listen to and feel rhythms, and appreciate them, without having to know it's written in catalectic anapaestic tetrameter or whatever. Forward to Antiquity!

[Alexander III]

Slam poetry is not the 'future' of poetry, but it does have a future in poetry, and is a fresh, vibrant, youth-oriented branch of the genre. Most importantly, it stresses the performative aspect of poetry. Who cares if traditionalist snobs don't like it?

For me, the future of poetry is to get off the page and get back to being an aural art at least as much as it is currently a visual one. This can easily be achieved though poets reading their latest books and making these available as downloads (perhaps with a discount if you've bought the book). The only barrier to this is cost as far as I can see, and the lack of demand for poetry generally.

There have been steps in this direction for about the past decade in the UK, thanks largely to ex-Laureate Andrew Motion's Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do). I've found that once you can hear a poet's voice - particularly contemporary poets writing free verse - you can read their work a lot better. I think this is the way forward, because it democratizes the art - the 'average reader / listener' can listen to and feel rhythms, and appreciate them, without having to know it's written in catalectic anapaestic tetrameter or whatever. Forward to Antiquity!


But if you can't feel the rhythm when reading it the poet has failed with rhythm. If you need to hear a free verse poem in order to get a sense of the rhythm, the poet quite clearly has not done a good job with the free verse form.

[JCamilo]

Plus, the blalblabla rythimic names are good for study, not for listening. In Brazil, popular poetry know as Cordel or repentistas (oral bards) basically write or improvise with the same structure of Camões but they have no idea what an hexameter is. Any kid can feel the rythim of really good poems without having a notion about poetry.

And I think there is no sense about future of poetry. If nobody writes a single verse from now on, the future of poetry still the same and granted.

[blank|verse]

But if you can't feel the rhythm when reading it the poet has failed with rhythm. If you need to hear a free verse poem in order to get a sense of the rhythm, the poet quite clearly has not done a good job with the free verse form.
I hear what you're saying, AIII, but you're privileging reading poetry over listening to it, which I think is wrong, and which is where Slam poetry is successful, because it puts greater emphasis of the performative aspect of poetry. (Although I think it's a fair criticism to say it places too much emphasis on this.)

Yes, poems should work on the page as well, but not exclusively. From my own experience, I now have a greater understanding and appreciation of individual poems, particularly free verse; of individual poets; and a greater sense of how to write in free verse myself because I have listened to poets read their own work. Intonation, cadence, variations of dialect (and I'm thinking of poems written in standard English or American-English) and other speech-related factors do not come across when looking at black marks on paper.

Poetry began as a more social, performative art, and it's how I feel poetry should develop now there is the technology to disseminate easily sound recordings of poets reading their work. I also feel (particularly contemporary) poetry deserves to be read more widely, and I think listening to poems is a good way of increasing the number of people who will be able to appreciate it, and not feel excluded because they 'don't get' free verse or feel it's too obscure or whatever else.

People should be able to buy individual poems as easily as songs from iTunes. Apple could even set up their own website - iRhymes.

[JCamilo]

You two are talking the same thing as if it is different. Obviously poems, great poems, are beautiful when we listen to it. But a poem that demands the sound for you to sense the rythim and this does not happen in the written form, is a failure. If it happens in the sound version only, means its strength is born from the performer, not from the text.

Obviously, this does not exclude anyone from seeing the rythim when reading loud and then finding the rythim technique in the written form. For what I understood, there is nothing special about slam poetry, poems were usually writen and present to the public by the poet in oral presentations. Mallarmé did with with his Dice Throw, so perhaps Slam poetry failure is their own premisse that there is not those who have some domain about what is literature, good or bad. They would know they are not new.

[Jassy Melson]

Your "teacher" is just downright stupid for making such a statement.

[_Shannon_]

I don't think it's THE future, but I think it's part of a future. Poetry, at least in America--I can't speak for elsewhere has largely become embedded in creative writing programs within the university system. I see slam as a response to that, a bringing poetry back to the "people". I think the uprise of the singer/songwriter has helped lead to a demise of poetry amongst non-academics. In today's poetry climate, no way a doctor from Patterson leads a poetry revolution.

My personal hope is that slam is a reaction, and we'll end up somewhere back in the middle--where poetry is both a written form, as well as an oral form. I am really lucky to live in a place full of creativity, and so I can go read decently constructed poetry, as well as embark on a project with a jazz bassist to collaborate some spoken word experiments. But still, in this town music is at the forefront-and poetry still largely relegated to the university.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I don't think it's fair to write off slam poetry so quickly, i.e., "It's terrible." It's like anything else--there's some good stuff and some bad stuff, and there is more bad than good. It's a different artistic expression, and to just say it's terrible (with no reasons as to why, no less) is just being shortsighted, and comes off as more than a little pompous.

As to the main question--is it the future of the genre--I would say no. Poetry will not die, and definitely not because of its lack of popularity, because, in recent times at least, it has never been popular. Still, there are many, many people writing poetry. Plus, as I read someone point out in another thread (but can't remember which) the lack of popularity for poetry can be seen as a good thing, as it allows it not to be corrupted by popular culture.

[Crass the head]

It is certainly more direct than classical poetry. Slam poetry is, still, mainly rap without a beat. Its all meant to impress, not to leave an impression. I find it sad. The average slam poet differs not from another. The euphemisms are very bland. THere's always the desire to construct some wack *** rhyme scheme, usually internal rhyme, and that is probably the most distinguishable characteristic about the style.

[Armel P]

Performed poetry seems to me to be just that: poetry that is performed, after it is already poetry. There will always be the potential of judging the merits of a performed poem without the performance, as one could judge a song without a performance or a play without a performance. So, unless I'm misunderstanding something, it doesn't make sense to say that poetry+performance will be the new poetry. Plus, I'd like to see someone perform a poem by E.E. Cummings and capture the complete essence.

[Heteronym]

What's slam poetry anyway?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

It's basically rapping, with more "poetic" lyrics and no music. I can be interesting. Just type in "slam poetry" to YouTube and you'll get plenty of examples.

[Basil]

I can be interesting.
Oh yeah? Prove it!

[mortalterror]

I've looked at some of the poetry slams on youtube. They are nothing to be proud of. The best don't have half the talent of serious rappers, let alone John Ashbery or Seamus Heaney. Rap is definitely not the future of poetry, but it's a hell of a lot better than slam poetry.

Eminem- No Love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV2ssT8lzj8
Common- I Used To Love HER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C99iG4HoO1c
Tupac- Changes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Y9-JlSRXw

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Oh yeah? Prove it!

I was just taking up the voice of opposition. I didn't know I was going to have to prove anything. That sounds like a lot of work. I'll just concede. Slam poetry is ****, as is that crap mortalterror linked, though Tupac is redeemable--but Eminem and Lil' Wayne are complete and utter garbage. :nod:

[Heteronym]

So Slam poetry is more a way of performing poetry and not of making it? Then I don't see what's the problem. If a couple of poets want to recite poetry like that, it's their decision. But I don't see how they're representative of world poetry at the moment.

[JBI]

I was just taking up the voice of opposition. I didn't know I was going to have to prove anything. That sounds like a lot of work. I'll just concede. Slam poetry is ****, as is that crap mortalterror linked, though Tupac is redeemable--but Eminem and Lil' Wayne are complete and utter garbage. :nod:

Tupac is maybe redeemable as music, or "rap" but he is not redeemable as a poet, he does not read as well as you are suggesting, and even the "quality" lyrics are restricted to a few songs. "Hit em Up" does not, for instance, offer great poetics, though the rhymes work when being sung I guess.